IBM Blue Business Platform morphs into IBM Smart Business

IBM Smart Business — After two years of work, I and hundreds of other IBM employees finally see the fruits of our labor. Here’s a press announcement about the general launch of the IBM Smart Business platform to the public.

Some background into IBM Smart Business… The premise was simple. There was a tremendous need to make IT less complex for small and medium businesses. To address this, three things were created.

Smart Market: a Web-enabled, one-stop SMB marketplace clients can use to browse, rate and buy solutions or collaborate with other clients, industry experts and vendors from around the world.

Smart Cube: a secure, turn-key computer designed to deliver integrated solutions directly to the client. Smart Cubes install and connect users to Smart Market within minutes.

Smart Desk: a Web-enabled dashboard that clients can use as a single-point-of-contact for Smart Business maintenance, from updating applications automatically or subscribing to an on-demand service.

The model we tried to emulate in the project codenamed BBP was to think just like the Apple iPod model — the iTunes Store (Smart Market), iPod (Smart Cube), and the iTunes desktop application (Smart Desk).

I can only speak for the Smart Desk side of things, as I played a hand in its initial phases, parts of the GUI, and the build automation/testing of the Smart Desk.

UPDATE: I needed to retract some parts of this posting. Sorry about that.

Basically, I mentioned some generally public technologies (nothing confidential or anything like that) that make up the IBM Smart Desk software. Things that a developer would end up putting on their resume. For instance, JSF, AJAX, and Dojo Toolkit was just a few of the cool things that we incorporated into the GUI.